The State Department on Monday reassigned Daniel Fried, the special envoy for closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and will not replace him, according to an internal personnel announcement. Mr. Fried’s office is being closed, and his former responsibilities will be “assumed” by the office of the department’s legal adviser, the notice said.

The announcement that no senior official in President Obama’s second term will succeed Mr. Fried in working primarily on diplomatic issues pertaining to repatriating or resettling detainees appeared to signal that the administration does not currently see the closing of the prison as a realistic priority, despite repeated statements that it still intends to do so.

I myself welcome the drone attacks as well as keeping Gitmo open. But the hypocrisy of the left is mind boggling.

Glenn Greenwald ‏(the only liberal who has stayed consistent through both Bush and Obama) details the fact vs. fiction of Obama’s excuses for keeping Gitmo open:

Whenever the subject is raised of Obama’s failure to close GITMO, the same excuse is instantly offered on his behalf: he tried to do so but Congress (including liberals like Russ Feingold and Bernie Sanders) thwarted him by refusing to fund the closing. As I documented at length last July, this excuse is wildly incomplete and misleading. When it comes to the failure to close GITMO, this “Congress-prevented-Obama” claim has now taken on zombie status – it will never die no matter how clearly and often it is debunked – but it’s still worth emphasizing the reality.

I won’t repeat all of the details, citations and supporting evidence – seehere – but there are two indisputable facts that should always be included in this narrative. The first is that what made Guantánamo such a travesty of justice was not its geographic locale in the Caribbean Sea, but rather its system of indefinite detention: that people were put in cages, often for life, without any charges or due process. Long before Congress ever acted, Obama’s plan was to preserve and continue that core injustice – indefinite detention – but simply moved onto US soil.

Put simply, Obama’s plan was never to close GITMO as much as it was to re-locate it to Illinois: to what the ACLU dubbed “GITMO North”. That’s why ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said of Obama’s 2009 “close-GITMO” plan that it “is hardly a meaningful step forward” and that “while the Obama administration inherited the Guantánamo debacle, this current move is its own affirmative adoption of those policies.” That’s because, he said, “the administration plans to continue its predecessor’s policy of indefinite detention without charge or trial for some detainees, with only a change of location.”

And the reason Democratic Senators such as Feingold voted against funding GITMO’s closing wasn’t because they were afraid to support its closing. It was because they refused to fund the closing until they saw Obama’s specific plan, because they did not want to support the importation of GITMO’s indefinite detention system onto US soil, as Obama expressly intended.

In sum, Obama’s “closing GITMO” plan was vintage Obama: a pretty symbolic gesture designed to enable Democrats to feel good while retaining the core powers that constituted the injustice in the first place. As the ACLU’s Romero said: “shutting down Guantánamo will be nothing more than a symbolic gesture if we continue its lawless policies onshore.” Again, had Obama had his way – had Congress immediately approved his plan in full – the system of indefinite detention that makes GITMO such a disgrace would have continued in full, just in a different locale.

john

Actually the civilian Federal Courts have done an excellent job of dealing with terrorists. About 90% of he major terrorism cases have resulted in convictions http://cnsnews.com/news/article/terror-conviction-rate-high-us-questions
The Military Commissions have a very poor record with only 4 convictions which were gotten by plea bargains with sentence of little more than time served. The only 2 sentences that resulted in harsh life sentences were just overturned last week by a Federal Appeals Court.
Obama wanted to move KSM and others to the USA and try them. KSM was on record as wanting to plead guilty, AND be given the death penalty. If some Americans had not objected that trial in New York it would have been over and done with sentenced pronounced. Congress has refused to fund any money to transfer these last 187 out of 850 people ( almost all of the ones who left Gitmo were released under Bush). Although conditions have improved greatly at Gitmo, Gitmo like Abu Ghrib will always be a black mark on the USA. It will also continue to be a symbol that radical islamists can use to their advantage, an advantage that will continue to cost the lives of people who serve in the US military.
It is doubtful whether the military commission will be able to convict anyone. Even the military now sees that to be a fact. http://www.navytimes.com/mobile/news/2013/01/ap-verdict-reversals-guantanamo-trials-012713

Smorgasbord

@Nan G: #1
With all the pictures that were used to PhotoShop, and someone finding the original picture, you would think that the ones doing the PhotoShoping would know that if a picture is out there, the other side has seen it, and might remember it. Different web sites have shown those original pictures.